Camera Work: On with the Show! (page 2)

Whether you're working with one camera or four, setting them up for performance taping is critically important.

Remember that these camcorders and their operators will have to stay in the same place, working in the dark, perhaps with audience members around them, for up to two hours or longer. Here are some tips for obtaining the best from both humans and hardware.

• Tripod. A good sturdy tripod is important and a smooth-moving head is a must. With the lens set at telephoto lengths, every jiggle and jerk is painfully obvious on-screen. Most tripods have an extendible center column. Because they reduce tripod stability, use these only for a fixed camera that's recording the wide angle cutaways.
• Monitor. An external monitor is essential. If you have to glue your eye to a camcorder viewfinder, half an hour's shooting will give you a serious crick. A whole show'll make you feel like Quasimodo after a night's repose on the roof tiles of Notre Dame.
  A five- or nine-inch monitor placed below the tripod head will let the camera person comfortably work the tripod handle with one hand and the focus and zoom controls with the other.
  Incidentally, if you plan to do considerable work like this, look for a camcorder with zoom on the remote control, for even greater flexibility.
  Of course, if you have to shoot in the midst of the audience, a conventional monitor would be too bright and distracting. In this situation, an external LCD monitor works well, though its limited resolution and short battery life can pose problems.
• Power. Uninterrupted power is essential for taping longer programs, and that means extension cords. When shooting from the audience, try to set up near a wall outlet. If that's not practical, use duct tape to secure every foot of your cable so that the audience members won't trip on it.
  One exception: if you have plenty of batteries and you're taping in short segments (such as individual musical pieces in a concert), you can swap batteries during the applause. You'll find that audio edits during sustained applause are usually inaudible on playback.
• Cables. In a multi-camera shoot, each camcorder sends a video cable to the mixer/switcher (but not an audio cable, as we'll see shortly). For optimal video quality, use a Y/C cable if the camcorder has a jack for it, and keep cable length as short as possible. Even with Y/C cables, runs of 20 feet or more will degrade the signal.
  And here's a nifty trick for getting easy, first-generation cutaways from a multiple camera setup: while you're laying down the switched signal on a VCR, keep a backup tape rolling in every camera. That way, if you have three cameras, for example, you'll obtain not one cutaway tape to choose from, but three.
• Communications. If you're working solo, communicate with your camcorder by wearing headphones to monitor audio quality. Camera operators in switched, multi-camera setups should wear intercoms so that the director can tell them what to shoot next. Left to their own judgment, camera people--especially good ones--have a tendency to frame the action very similarly. So unless the director instructs them differently via intercom, they'll often compose shots too much alike to cut between.

Communicating with multiple operators gets us into procedures for fully-switched, multi-camera productions. Such a production may sound involved, requiring expensive equipment. But it's really not, and it really doesn't.

At the school where I teach video production, we tape plays and concerts by feeding four video signals through a Videonics MX1 switcher to an S-VHS VCR. Since we don't fit in the lighting booth, we take over half the balcony (during a less-popular Thursday night performance) for our cameras and control table.

Our taping procedures would fill an article by themselves, but the basic hardware lash-up should be plain from figure 1, and here are some notes that you may find useful.

• Cameras. We assign camera chores as follows: camera 1 maintains a wide shot (still panning because the performance area is too wide for a single composition). Cameras 2 and 3 capture full shots and medium shots, as cued by the director. Camera 4 (which has the longest zoom lens) hunts closeups, also specified by the director.
• Communications. The director, the camera people, and the tech director (who switches the video) all wear wireless headsets, but the camera people listen without replying. That's because each camcorder is also rolling tape, and the on-camera mike would capture their conversation. The audio engineer wears regular headphones instead, to monitor the sound. Wireless intercoms aren't as expensive you may think, and are readily available at many consumer electronics outlets (such as Radio Shack).
• Audio. When the performers are miked, we may take an audio feed from the theater's own sound system. Otherwise, we run two identically-placed mikes to an audio mixer and then to the recording VCR. (The second mike is for protection, in case one mike fails. Believe me, it happens!)
• Video switching. Note that each camera's video appears on a monitor at the control table. That's because the images displayed on the MX1's own monitor are so small that the tech director can't tell whether or not they're in focus.
• Directing. The director sits where the monitors are visible, but far enough from the cameras so that his or her intercom commands are inaudible to the camera mikes. In addition to calling for new angles, the director has to tell each camera operator when his or her image is being recorded. That's so the operator won't refocus or set up a new shot while on-line. (In studio-grade equipment, indicator lights tell operators automatically when their camera is active.)
• Rehearsal. When possible, we like to attend three performances. During the dress rehearsal, we lay down a wide shot, for later study. Then we tape a performance, as described above, and view the master tape. If it contains any goofs we can't cover with footage from another camera (including the dress rehearsal shot), we'll go back again to get the cutaways we need.

We've mentioned some audio recording techniques--here are additional tips for obtaining quality sound from auditorium performances.

• External mikes. First, even if you have only a single camera, use an external microphone to record sound. Place the mike as close as possible to the stage.
• Mike types. If you record often in the same auditorium, as we do, consider investing in a microphone optimized for your situation. For example, if you can record with a wireless mike close to the stage, choose a pickup pattern wide enough to cover the area. Another choice is a pressure-zone style mike: a flat plate that sits on and obtains its sound from the stage itself. In our case we use a pair of shotgun mikes, as noted, mounted on a 12-foot aluminum boom thrust out and over the cameras (to keep them out of our shots).
• Production mixing. If you have the personnel for it, monitor and ride the audio signal level going in to the recorder (even if it's just the one camcorder). We've found that even with automatic gain control on the record unit, we can still even out sound levels considerably.

And finally, in all this nuts-and-bolts discussion, we haven't yet noted an important factor in performance event shooting. Whether you're all by yourself or working with six other people as we do, taping concerts and shows is exciting and tremendous fun, because you feel like part of the production yourself.

Of course, in a sense, you are.

Good shooting!

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